During different types of research, a user may be prompted to view content of electronic documents using the original applications suitable for previewing the documents. There are cases, where not only the content of the documents is required to be previewed, but also contents layout, style, formatting, and other documents' specifics. Such documents may be text documents, graphical documents, audio files, video records, etc. They may be stored in different tile formats, which are associated with different software applications for accessing, rendering, analyzing, modifying, etc. For example, during forensic investigations it is often necessary to view the content of documents using the original software applications. It may not be sufficient to read the text content of a document file, but to see the full layout.
Different document formats may require different applications to render them. The applications may allow presentation of “active content”, when such content is part of a document. For example, Portable Document Format (PDF) files may contain Java Script® code, Microsoft® (MS) Office documents may include macros or Visual Basic® code, etc. It is possible that such documents contain viruses or other malicious content, which may harm the computing system, where the application for rendering the documents is running.
The files to be displayed, may be of specific document formats and types, and may be platform and/or operating system specific. There may be document formats that are available only for software products of a particular software/hardware vendor and for specific platform and device characteristics. For example, there are document formats that are available only for applications running on Microsoft® OS, such as Windows® 10. For example, some documents may be targeted to be rendered and manipulated on a particular type of a mobile device, a tablet, on a specific hardware infrastructure, etc., where a correspondingly required software infrastructure (OS and application) is required.